Thursday, February 20, 2014

No, not only is Market Narrative in fact a proprietary, cross-platform message relaying system adapted for modern use for all major internet access devices, including smartphones and mobile devices, which allows instant and free access of contained information to the client and accessible via all major platforms, including Android, Apple iOS, Windows Phone and Blackberry, but Market Narrative also features animated gifs of kittens:

Extensive market research has conclusively demonstrated the superior results that a cross-platform message relaying system will obtain by leveraging cute kitten gifs as part of the unified user experience.

For example, this blog presently generates over $20 a month in earnings; a monthly earnings growth of 20% (easily obtainable within the kitten gif submarket) would mean this blog will generate $6 billion/month profits after just nine years. Is that earnings potential, or what?

In addition, the Market Narrative blog also features investment commentary by Mila Kunis. Though I'm at work now so I can't post any Mila Kunis pics, sorry. But Mila is a famous follower of this blog, and this means Market Narrative is also ideally placed to ride on the coat-tails of her fame leverage the association with Mila Kunis for maximum benefit.

IKN, by contrast, is only read by smelly geologists and floor traders: truly the apex and epitome of unsexy, its readership guarantees slow and inglorious death for any corporation who associates with it (e.g. Vena Resources, Focus Ventures, Minera IRL).

Further, it must be noted that Otto Rock's a fucking Chavez-worshipping indigenous-people-sympathizing commie Bolivaran bastard who answers to a Soviet-trained handler and is only going to make a big show of how he doesn't want your fascist white American money. In stark contrast, I am a sociopathic corporate whore who would like nothing better than to see how fast I can burn through nineteen billion dollars. Or even nineteen thousand dollars. In fact, I've already bookmarked a significant number of higher-end Toronto-area escort agency websites in anticipation of your money.

Plz forward to Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Dick Costolo or frankly anyone with more money than brains superior ability to leverage growth from an established base of kitten gifs.

Yesterday afternoon I suddenly had extreme hunger pangs and had to go get an egg mcmuffin.

I think the hunger pangs must mean my lung infection is wearing off and I'm finally getting better. So today I'm going to go fill up on ribs and beer for lunch, to give my immune system that one final push that it needs.

By the way, I freakin' love egg mcmuffins! So chock-full of fat and protein! That stuff hits my bloodstream and it's like a veil has been lifted from my eyes.

Fat is actually good for you, btw - it's what your muscles run on, and it probably also is needed for proper functioning of your bone marrow and your immune system. So when your body is screaming for saturated fats, it's telling you that it's low on vital nutrients: so do make sure you indulge yourself.

Anyway, two morning newsbits for you, and they're both on the yellow metal:

Holdings of the largest gold-backed ETF, New York-listed SPDR Gold Shares, fell more than 550 tonnes.

Meanwhile, demand soared to record levels in China and rose sharply in Turkey, Egypt, Japan and India, despite tough import restrictions in the latter, historically the world's biggest bullion consumer.

While the statistics office does not provide data on the source or destination of its gold shipments by volume, analysts say outflows from ETFs are likely to have fed this demand via Switzerland.

"A lot of metal was migrating (last year) from Europe and North America, not least from the SPDR and similar funds, to the Middle East, the Far East, and to some extent South Asia," said Rhona O'Connell, head of metals research at consultancy Thomson Reuters GFMS.

"Metal coming out of the ETFs and to some extent the over-the-counter market would have been large 400-ounce bars. They would have been going through refineries, predominantly in Switzerland, for conversion into kilobars or smaller."

Gold held to back the SPDR ETF is stored in 400-ounce bars in HSBC's vaults in London, according to the fund's prospectus.

In a note earlier this week, Australian bank Macquarie, citing trade data from EU statistics agency Eurostat, said the UK exported 1,739 tonnes of gold in 2013, with the vast majority sent to Switzerland.

This is more than 10 times higher than in 2012, it said. "We believe this largely reflects investor liquidation, and that much of it eventually found its way to China," Macquarie said.

So here's a question for Wall Street Whitey: when these guys are so desperately buying, do you really think it's smart for you to be selling?

UK GOLD EXPORTS in 2013 were nearly double the volume of exchange-traded fund liquidation, new research shows.

Compared with only 160 tonnes in 2012, exports of physical gold bullion totaled 1,739 tonnes last year according to data reported by the UK's HMRC tax authority to the European Union's Eurostat agency.

More than 5 times visible UK gold imports, according to a report from Macquarie Bank analyst Matthew Turner, and equal to 60% of annual world gold mining output, that was nearly twice the outflow of gold from ETF gold trusts, which typically vault metal in London to back their shares.

The gap between gold ETF sales and UK exports suggests heavy sales by investors such as hedge funds and wealthy family offices, who owned metal outright and vaulted it securely in London – heart of the world's physical bullion and silver market – with either a major bank or private specialist.

Again, Whitey, you gots ta ax yourself: why do you want to give all your gold to Asia so darn cheap?

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Reformed Borker (Bork Bork Bork!) - chart of the day: Shanghai surprise. I don't see it, but Fatty notes that a Chinese breakout would be about the last thing that anyone would expect. And since it says something about gold, I thought I'd pass it on to you.

I never blindly follow the suggestions of anyone. Even with people I like and follow regularly, I recognize they sometimes exhibit disastrous judgment in their own reading material and news sources. So, I did some quick googling and found this:

Now, there's nothing better than reading an interview about gold from February 2012 to determine whether a guy is worth listening to. And I'm sorry but this article is just plain embarrassing. Here's some takeaways:

2. He's all about the "money printing" and "devaluation", which means he had no clue about the economic situation of the developed world in 2012.

3. He misread the Euro crisis, which means I don't care what he has to say for any future predictions.

4. When he said "This 11-year ascent in both precious metals is only going to change when central
bank policy surrounding it changes. I just don't see that happening in the
foreseeable future until they get this debt problem under control," he got the next two years in precious metals disastrously wrong, and he got it wrong via incompetent incomprehension of reality.

5. He uses the word "fiat". He uses it in that way.

6. Oh and he (elsewhere) thinks Eric Sprott is clever.

If I'm going to listen to a person speak in a room full of smelly goldbugs 4 levels down at the MTCC, I want that person to (a) be competent in his purported subject matter, (b) always be more-or-less right, or at least not regularly caught flat-footed, and (c) not be full of talking points cribbed from the Republican Party echo chamber.

Grant Williams fails at all three. So in place of his talk at PDAC, I'll be taking a smoke break.

Aleph Blog - gold inflows and outflows. A follow-up to Josh Brown's point that people sell at bottoms and buy at tops. Although I would point out that the sellers of GLD were not mom & pop investors: the sellers were major hedge funds.

As Peter Tchir noted on the collapse through $1500, these funds bought GLD for the weakest and most wrong reasons: first they hated Obama, and then they were expecting hyperinflation and dollar collapse, and then they were buying gold because it was going up, and finally everyone owned GLD just because everyone else owned GLD.

That wasn't going to end well, and so it didn't, and Tchir is the only guy who nailed it right at the outset.

The blogger also adds this:

As for GLD, be wary about paper gold. Is it really fully collateralized by audited gold in a warehouse? There are lots of promises of gold being traded, but how much physical gold could you have delivered to you, should you want it?

Maybe he's a doomer or something, I don't know him.

But I'll provide an easier, more sensible and mainstream translation of this for Barry and Josh:

GLD is not physical gold. It is a derivative of physical gold. This is so even if GLD is backed 100% by physical gold. This is because GLD carries counterparty risks that do not exist with physical gold: in a limit situation, the gold in GLD's vaults can disappear if enough things go wrong.

Those sorts of things that go wrong are exactly what physical gold is bought for protection against. Therefore, GLD is by definition not gold. You do not buy GLD if you want "the protection of gold".

But it doesn't matter because there's no good reason for any hedge fund to own physical gold. Because the insurance value of gold doesn't even pass through the hedge fund to the investors: if things go wrong in the world, that hedge fund also goes to zero as its investors' assets get gobbled up by its counterparties (or spent on hookers and blow by the fund managers).

So it's still true that GLD is not gold. You trade GLD to trade the price of gold without a commodity brokerage account, is all.

Mineweb - forecasters still bearish gold. SocGen is calling for 4Q14 average of $1050, and some other clown is calling for a 4Q14 of $1020. I guess you can call this a demonstration of the inertia of narrative? I'm sure that they'll change their forecasts at $1400. And people in the LameStream media will still think their forecasts are worth listening to.

There's no reason for silver to have broken out of that 3 month range like this. There's no shortage of silver, and silver is not gold, but for some stupid reason I guess Wall Street Whitey sees the positivity in gold and has decided to leverage that play buy buying a totally unrelated metal.

Monday, February 17, 2014

Except it seems Rick Rule has bumped Mickey and is now in the 2:05 spot.

I want to see Roulston, maybe Jojo, Kaiser, Cookie, Coffin and Adrian Day. Problem with Coffin is that I'll have to squeeze past Rick Rule's Jovian ego just to get into the room. I'm sure the room will be full of fanbois for Ricky.

Any of these other guys worth seeing at all? I think I haven't heard of Garrett Goggin, Mike Berry, Chris Berry and Grant Williams. The rest I already have opinions of and won't waste my time seeing in any case.

Though I might just stick around to heckle James West about Liberty Silver, if one of you guys offers to get me drunk.

2. a slew of revisions to gold forecasts from the Wall Street clown car, with clever justifications that completely ignore how nothing has fundamentally changed for the gold market since their previous $1100 forecasts (other than Soros).

3. a bevy of articles from the click-whore media, suggesting gold's ascent is due to something stupid like the threat of coming inflation, or threat of US collapse, or whatever.

4. probably even mainstream media interviews with goldbug queers like Marc Faber, John Hussman and other Alex Jones types.

From late Jan to early Feb, you get that little cusp drawn that finds support at the Bollinger mean and EMA(16), and the volume has been increasing over the past 2 weeks. That's been a breakout on everyone else's chart whenever it happened.

Plusses, LYD has a decent-grade low-capex deposit that needs to be bought if the world still wants to buy gold 5 years from now. And they're a GDXJ component, which means they're being bought indiscriminately.

Minuses, Armenia has been aggressively fucking them over.

Meh... may as well just buy GDX or GDXJ, or even HGU if you're Canadian and like leverage.

Dammit, Canada and US markets are apparently closed today, and here's me wanting to buy more mining stocks!

It's fun, by the way, to look at my account summary and see very large numbers printed in green. I guess that's why I always want to come back to that filthy foul-mouthed slut known as junior mining - she's a diseased psychopath, sure, and she's got a horrible rep, but the sex is unbelievable when she lets you have some.

Long-term, GDX has outperformed (not sucked as bad as) GDXJ over the past 3 years, maybe because the GDX is made up of companies with actual income, while the GDXJ is saddled with a large population of moose-pasture lies that were worth billions years ago and nothing now.

But if you look at the Bollinger bands, GDX is at the lower level of its valuation continuum.

And this is what that lower level looks like when zoomed in on the daily:

So the ratio has gone from 0.71 to 0.60 in a little over a month.

To some extent, this is because the GDXJ stocks were so hard puked-down that some have snapped back fiercely: OGC's gone from $1.50 to $2.60 is this time, while MUX went from $1.90 to $3.30. Idiot stocks like ATC have gone from under $.60 to over $1.20.

So maybe the outperformance of GDXJ is a function of how much those stocks suck?

Well now, apparently capital is now interested in loading up on gold miners again, and so the question is, can you see an outperformance in GDX versus GDXJ?

I doubt you can see 100% moves in the major miners. Seems unpossibru. But on the other hand, how much upside could possibly be left in the mosse-pasture purveyors? At a bare minimum, someone's gotta be left who'd be happy to unload their shares at a 100% premium over December. Then again, maybe those shareholders left in the juniors are truly stupid enough to think they can make back yet another 100% on where they are now?

Bespoke - gold is above its 200DMA. Uh-oh! The blogosphere has picked up on gold! And this is a good website too, not Business Insider! It might be the overwhelming disgust of gold and the miners has finally dissipated and we're going to see cash flow back in to float us back to mediocrity now.

Yahoo Finacne - hedge funds going long gold. And suddenly balance has returned to the Force! It's funny by the way to read that Soros bought 6.3 million shares of Barrick, cuz...

Mining.com - 36 million ounces of gold vanished from Barrick's reserves. That happened when Barrick had to use $1100 gold instead of $1500 to calculate their reserves. This will hopefully explain to the pencil-pusher at Goldman Sachs that future gold supply really does disappear (from an accountancy standpoint, anyway) when the price goes down to $1100.

I review a lot of early and advanced stage projects and I can count on my one hand websites that I have come across that are actually attempting to present their results in a truthful and conservative (wise) way.

Eventually I realized the company mentioned did not even post their NI 43-101 report on their site. No, you had to go over to the SEDAR website and do a little advanced search. That’s the mandatory Canadian document filing system for listed companies. The geology and resource section was beautifully decorated, naturally, with the main emphasis on “equivalent grade”. The reporting/ publishing of “equivalent grade” is of course banned by the Canadian Securities Law unless it is accompanied by the actual metal grade. If you were to have had a magnifying glass at hand, you would have been able to see the actual metal grade printed in microscopic font and 1 RGB code away from pure white. Simply put, pathetic.

This sort of chronic dishonesty (a half truth is a lie and a truth told with the intent to deceive is also a lie) in the exploration industry is what perpetuates a negative stigma around the mining industry as a whole, but in the end, it is the junior company itself that loses the most. People, and/or companies who are looking to spend serious money tend to do rigorous due diligence. And a half baked, half honest marketing attempt leaves a bad and sceptical taste in the mouth.

Generally true, and I completely agree with the underlined two statements in the third paragraph, and I'd add that these companies should not be even traded on grown-up exchanges. Let them all go to the NEX or the pinks to scare up sucker capital. Because if they aren't giving you the information you need to know, they're asking you to play the sucker.